FFvii Fortress is my baby, it’s the RPG that I’m most associated with and that I’ve spent the most time actually working on and running. The original Fortress opened back in 2003, though this layout is from the final release which was circa 2006 or so. Over a span of three years most of my RPG time and attention when to Fortress and through the evolution of the site it shows. The original Fortress was plain, the content pretty bad those the systems were in place early on. After a couple successive re-makes I finally found myself with the talent I needed to do it right, to make it look and ‘feel’ the way I wanted it to from the start and it shows in pages like this one. I selected the location template as the page to show, while not perfect (honestly I should have done a little more designing in the quest area but you have to remember MSN Groups was limited to 16kb page size so I couldn’t do much more). The layout itself is pretty standard for me at the time, clean, not flashy in any way. However, what always stood out with Fortress is the time I spent working on the in-page content design, as detailed here with the actual location image and sub-location information. I’m still really proud of these pages and hopefully some day soon I can have the whole site archived here (as well as the previous version so you can see the evolution for v2 to v3)

This layout was a special one, a very special one. Up until this point, most of my layouts had been pretty bad (not that this one isn’t by today’s standards) but when I made this layout and uploaded it to DeviantART I found it got a lot of attention (at least for me, lol) which was a big surprise. Again up until now I hadn’t really done any wallpapers or much in the way of actual art, none of us were very good, this was the beginning of everything to come. The first challenge after making it, was to code it on MSN Groups. That was not easy in 2004, I was better than most everyone else on Groups at HTML but I still sucked and it was a real challenge making this look like it did in my design, but I pulled it off. Sad to say that AD was pretty much going downhill by that point, the split had already happened and the site didn’t last that much longer. Still, this was an important layout, it will always hold a special place for me.

CPN and by connection of course CPN Groups was a big stepping stone for me. Finding out that MSN Groups was going to be closing was a major blow, by that time I had spent 8 years or so RPing and building my RPGs and communities on MSN Groups. With that news there was only one option, make my own. I really was out of my league when all of this started but somehow in the end I made it all work. The idea being that CPN Groups would be just like MSN Groups in structure but with more modern features, that meant that the actual group design would be similar to what MSN Groups had looked like, but with my own flair. Looking at this screenshot you can see how close the structure was to MSN Groups but it brought in the CPN theme and worked out really well for us while it lasted. I have some different color themes (black and pink) that were going to be released a long with an assort of others as premium themes, I’ll post some screens of them in the comments section.

This was kind of an interesting layout for me, for one it was for a friends website but I really put a lot of effort into making in something different for MSN Groups. At the time the idea of having a navigation and content areas not be even was something you didn’t see on MSN Groups because of the limited HTML allowed so when we showed this one off it was a big hit. In the end the RPG never actually got finished, which is a let down but I was really happy to do the layout for Serno and it’s one that I always enjoyed, I wish I still had a coded version of it someplace so it could be seen with content, but alas I only have the original working image that was used to slice from. As a side note many of the ideas here ended up making their way to my own Kingdom Hearts RPG that I started work on when Serno stopped working on Memoria Chains. This layout was made entirely in Adobe Photoshop 7.

Dragon Ball Z: Renewed Faith had a very long and interesting history, especially early on. Originally the RPG was being developed exclusively by Saiyen who one day in the Create chatroom took part in a lengthy discussion about how a true DBZ should be made, which led myself to becoming co-designer of the RPG. We really hyped RF up a lot, and we gained a lot of attention, some of it not so good. The original design, which is much like this one, was based off a Trigun Project Seeds layout I never used, just with the banner swapped out. However this bad attention led us to move the site to a .com. That’s what this version of the RF layout is, complete with dated fusion news installed and some other poorly conceived .com stuff. In the end we ended up moving it back to MSN Groups where it fared much better than on the .com. This layout was created completely in Adobe Photoshop 7.0, and is pretty simple really.

The Create version eight layout was probably the most well received Create layout outside of the original one. This layout borrows a lot from some previous layouts I had worked on, including the versions six and seven Create layouts which share a similar color profile and header setup, as well as the Synthetic Art layout which was the one that inspired those two previous Create layouts. Where the version eight layout differs was in it’s basic structure, there was a lot more going on. From the animated feature area, something I had toyed with on the version five and six layouts but finally got right here, to the more detailed navigation area. All in all this may have been the best layout Create ever sported, and it probably should have stuck around a little longer than it did. This layout was made in Photoshop 7, the banner was borrowed from my wallpaper Dream of Change, with some coloration to fit this theme more.

This layout is kinda a bridge between two different points of my designing era on groups. Before this I had spent quite awhile working in a very simply, yet detailed, style. This style was generally white or grey in nature. Through 8 previous layouts create had pretty much stuck to this style with very few deviations, especially the 3-4 layouts directly before this one. After this point however, I started to branch out more, and while this wasn’t really the defining layout that caused me to do so, it was one of them. To this day I’m still really happy with this one, I think it’s a pretty nice design, it’s well organized, it has nice pattern work and the fonts look nice. All in all I probably should have kept this one around a little longer before moving on to version ten and eleven, which were less well received.

Ah the first redesign of Create, which happened probably a good 3 months or so into it’s life, which was about the norm for a redesign for the site, every few months or so. This version was a big shift from the original design, but still somewhat minimal. As I recall I went through about three concept designs before I ended up with this one, I picked a few things from each of them and together they kinda fused into the final layout (I still have the concept designs, I will upload them at some point). Looking back I’m very fond of the content area of this layout, it was the first time I had done avatars this way, something that would be a staple of my layouts for about 6 months. It also blends very well, perhaps a little more color would have been nice. Also I’m still very disappointed with the upper area and banner for this layout, as I recall I had a lot of trouble fitting something into the design and it shows, I wish I would have spent more time on it and perhaps version 3 would have been vastly different then what it ended up being.

I promised before when I posted my Beauty Inside submission that I would later post some of the other things I did with it. The most notable is this layout for Synthetic Art. At the time this was probably my boldest attempt at leaving MSN Groups for a true .com. SynArt was a step along with many of my pals from create to get out there (this happening right after our group Createv2 was hacked and taken over). Overall it really did ok, a lot of the members from MSN Groups followed us to the forums at SynArt and all in all while we were there it was a good time. However, work in the .com was hard and while I had previous experience this was the first time I was really trying to do more than I understood. I spent a lot of hours during this time playing around with php code snippets, installing software, etc and it allowed me to build up enough skill that later on down the road I would be able to build dbzrenewedfaith.com and then after the closing of MSN Groups my crowning achievement CPN. Stylistically it’s a pretty simple layout, but very clean, it would go on to be used again for Pokemon Concept.

My long in development, probably never to be completed Final Fantasy VIII RPG known simply as Annihilation. This layout had a LONG journey to get to this point, it actually started as a much smaller MSN Groups layout for my DBZ RPG, Renewed Faith. It never got used for RF because reformatting all the content was not a task we wanted to take. After that I had reworked it for a follow up to my Chrono Trigger RPG, but again I didn’t end up going there. Finally it came to use for FF8A. I was fast at work on the layout and RPG on MSN Groups before it closed and the project went into hiatus again finally to be fully revived on Dystopia Productions. What you are viewing here was the probably 60% complete player profile page, it was mostly working as it should but I was unable to finish the mechanics to do everything before I abandoned the project. This is the building blocks for what will be the Chimera Engine.